The April issue of The Walrus ships with a promotional DVD from HarperCollins—an interview with Barbara Gowdy about her new novel, Helpless. In the interview we learn the secret of how an author finds inspiration for writing fiction: “It was a day about three years ago when I was thinking: what is the worst thing that could happen to a person.”
Yes, that’s more or less how I come up with ideas for my blog: what’s the dumbest tripe an intelligent author could come up with when stuck in a contrived conversation with a prune of an interviewer? Whatever the answer, I’ll write about it.
To be fair, let me first say that I have great admiration for Barbara Gowdy’s writing. I haven’t yet read Helpless, but I recently finished The White Bone and thought it was a wonderful piece of empathy. Still, one senses that, as with Helpless, her earlier novel took its life from a similarly detached and hypothetical question: what would it be like to crawl inside the head of an elephant and look at the world from that point of view for a while?
Now that I think of it, if Gowdy and I had been in elementary school together, she’s probably the sort of girl I’d beat up at recess. I remember having an exercise in grade 6: imagine you’re a blade of grass pushing your way up through the last of the snow as spring is arriving. I sat and stared at the page. I hadn’t a clue what it might be like to be a blade of grass pushing through the snow. More to the point: I couldn’t give a shit what a blade of grass thinks about snow and spring. With a minute to go before recess, the teacher saw that I wasn’t writing anything, so she knelt beside my desk and asked what was wrong. I shrugged. Was I having trouble writing? Not really. I thought of all the science fiction books sitting on my shelf at home, and all the scraps of paper with the first lines of a dozen or so stories I planned to write. No. Writing wasn’t the problem. Well then, what? I watched the second hand creep towards recess. Time to be blunt. The problem was the question. It’s stupid, I said. Not the most literate adjective, but accurate. Meanwhile, my nemesis across the room, Doreen —, was onto her third sheet of foolscap. The bell rang. She handed the teacher her story and was out the door. I wanted to smash her prissy little face for being so dutiful.
I find it difficult to understand how an author can treat her writing as an hypothetical exercise. As I savour some lines from one of my favourites—Malcolm Lowry—I find it inconceivable that he should have sat at a desk and asked, merely as a thought experiment, what it would be like for a man to lose himself utterly to alcoholism. Instead, I imagine an author torn between lived experience and the pen, struggling to get the words out, labouring to be lucid for long enough stretches that some of his words might finally ring with a terrible beauty. Perhaps what I sense in Lowry is a kind of personal commitment. Not the commitment that sees a novel to completion. In the end, most authors have that. Rather, the commitment that demands the novel in the first instance. It’s as if Lowry writes to fulfill a pact with himself and to hell with the reader. Writing Under The Volcano seems a matter of necessity. How many authors can say truly: In writing this, nothing—not even my own will—could finally have influenced the outcome?
What frightens me about Gowdy is that I have more in common with her than I do with Lowry. While I can see the potential within my own life for things to unfold according to compulsions and obsessions and addictions, that is not how things have turned for me. Instead, I live in Toronto about 20 minutes north of Gowdy’s Cabbagetown home, firmly rooted, like Gowdy, in white middle–class Toronto stability, driven by no particular necessities than the ones that well up from within, enjoying a world–view which history may one day judge as at the pinnacle of privilege when measured against any age—past or future.
Is Gowdy’s little talk on the HarperCollins DVD a reflection of commitment? Or is it just a hustle? Has she cranked out a product that she now feels compelled to market in order to meet her mortgage payments? Again, thinking of Lowry, I find it inconceivable that he should have obliged his publisher by going on tour to promote his book. Lowry couldn’t have made it through a reading without slipping out for a drink.
At what point does Gowdy surrender control of her writing? Certainly she surrenders control of her marketing. She’s established within the HarperCollins fold. HarperCollins is owned by HarperMorrow Publishers which is owned by News Corporation which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch. Related media outlets include Fox Media, numerous radio and television stations, magazines and newspapers. See Who Owns What for details. A DVD inside the plastic wrapping of The Walrus is just one of countless ways in which large media conglomerates take advantage of their integrated corporate structures to market their products.
But beyond the marketing, does participation in an integrated media conglomerate harm the writing? Nowadays, when we speak about a publisher’s “house style,” we are speaking of only a handful of houses. Is there a flattening of styles in mainstream media? Has middle–class white urban culture grown so hegemonic that we can’t imagine ourselves using our words any other way?
If I were to write a novel, just as an exercise, about a woman perhaps, living in Cabbagetown, in her fifties and married to a poet, what would emerge? Hmm. It might be difficult for me to empathize with my character. Writing an elephant might be easier. Hmm. What would her typical writing day look like? Once the words started to flow, would they flow freely, or even at their inception would the editorial process already have kicked in. What can I and what can’t I get away with? she might be asking herself. I wonder what the MS would look like as she handed it to her editor. Would it be wildly imaginative, only to be watered down in order to suit whatever mysterious criteria a multi billion–dollar industry deems important? Or by the 5th or 6th book has the habit of watering down become internalized? Maybe (hypothetically) she gets abducted by a psychotic publisher from an independent press who facilitates an epiphany of sorts. She suffers (naturally), but the result is worth it—the finest novel of her career—though she dies (naturally), bitter and slightly mad, passing her final days in a cardboard box by the Don River.